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programming

Virtual Host Development: Part 1

I got a new PC this week. Oooooh. It instantly presented me with a challenge:

Q. Is it possible to make full use of a standard mid-range specification development desktop host?
A. … errr … dunno …

As a developer I have long believed that we, me included, fool ourselves into purchasing new hardware and software that we don’t need. This constant upgrade cycle blind-sides us from separating what’s important from what is aesthetically pleasing. Since 2004 (when we approached the PC clock-speed ceiling) I can’t think of any advance in software or hardware that has really compelled me to want to go and buy something new. I discovered some time back that the biggest productivity bonus you can get from any developer is to give them two monitors (oh, and a graphics card that can support them too!). Giving those developers Vista or a bigger/faster machine won’t buy you much other less help-desk time supporting old kit and a better relationship with your hardware vendor.

The things that have changed since 2004 is the cheapness of RAM & disk and the addition of multi-core CPUs. Although 64 bit has also come online too that in itself only really gives you more addressable RAM. For the moment the circa 3Gb addressable in most 32 bit OS’s is fine for me and my development needs. This means that by default I get as much RAM as the OS can handle, 2 large disks and a multi-core CPU.

So, in the absence of a new OS to tax it the new hardware was begging for a thrashing and I thought knew just the thing. I would start doing virtual host development. That is, install a VMware style virtual host manager and run my development environment entirely inside a guest operating system. The host operating system, i.e. the real one, would be used for sending email, surfing, browsing documents and running the virtual host manager.

This way of working has some desirable consequences:

  1. Snapshots – Most virtual host managers allow the taking of snapshots. So the plan is to take a snapshot after each major milestone of the virtual host build. That is:
    • Right after the install (& patch) of the base OS
    • After the install of the standard development tools
    • After the install of personal development tools that I use

    Regardless of the OS you use your development environment will usually take you a fairly long time to build. This is because you have to load: IDEs, source control, useful editors and whatever else you fancy. The installation of the DevStudio stack alone can take the best part of a day. The ability to go back in time to anyone of those points will be very useful if something goes wrong. It’s not only that though, most virtual host managers will allow you to ‘clone’ a snapshot so that you can take your current environment, clone it, fire it up, install something wacky, and see if it works. If it doesn’t work as you expected then you live to fight another day.

    2. Security – I have never particularly liked installing my custom tools and utilities on my company’s hardware. It complicates matters when system administrator’s are needed to try and resolve problems. This is because, and rightly so, the first thing they’ll blame when something goes wrong is that piece of custom software I installed last week. Therefore, I think, at least in theory that I will no longer need administrator privileges on my own machine because I will have an administrator account on my virtual hosts. I’m not convinced of this view just yet, but I aim to demonstrate it here!
  2. Testing – Deployment of my developed code is always hard to test. It’s hard because you need a clean machine to work with to be able to prove that the test was indeed a success. With the aid of snapshots I can boot a clean machine and attempt a deployment to it. If it succeeds great, if it fails I just start again safe in the knowledge that I haven’t soiled my clean machine and the test is still a good one.
  3. OS Choice – I still think UNIX is far and away the most powerful and transparent OS, but that might be because I’ve been banging my head against it for a very long time. Anyway, I like having UNIX around and when I don’t have it it makes me kind-of sad and angry. Angry that I can’t: grep a file for a regex pattern, pipe it through gawk to get a particular column, pipe that through sort, then pipe that through uniq -c and pipe the whole lot through sort -g. How else would you answer the question of how can you do a: 
    SELECT Value, COUNT(*) 
WHERE Value LIKE '%XYZ%'
GROUP BY Value 
ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC

    … on a flat file? On second thoughts don’t answer that.

In Part 2 I will look at what I discovered. The pitfalls of running a development host within a virtual host and more on why I really do love UNIX an awful lot.

(Ok perhaps I’ll leave that bit out :-))